Its been a while

It seems to have been ages since I last blogged - but boy oh boy have we had a busy Easter!! I honestly think its been the busiest Easter we've had since we've been here at the Victoria but once today is over and accounted for we'll be able to do the maths and say for certain. But Salcombe was hugely busy, you could have easily be mistaken for thinking it was a summers day............. plus Easter was later last year and the weather was just gorgeous. The weather this year was actually not as bad as we'd been fearing (blooming freezing today though - another bitingly cold wind!)

Wild bluebells in our garden

Thought you'd like to see this picture of one of the clumps of natural bluebells that are in out garden here at the pub - just soooo pretty!

A great shame that the St Austell little sapling planted in celebration of their 100 years in the business was snapped by a 'little darling' during the Easter weekend, but SOH is hopeful of being able to save it...........  I do wonder sometimes about the children (or rather their parents) that come to visit us and their behaviour. It does make me realise why some pubs are so NOT child friendly.  To be fair I guess it's like all things in life - it's only the minority of children (parents) that behave in this way - but it's really hard when you've put so much love and effort into the pub garden to see flowers picked and thrown around and such like being shown such disregard.  But hey ho, I suppose it's the way of the world and we'll continue to encourage children to come into our garden and enjoy themselves but in such a way that ALL children can enjoy what we've done.

Our boat in the garden

Talking of the garden, I think we're going to have something rather wonderful painted on the big plain red doors to the garden entrance and we are very excited about it..... but you're going to have to watch this space for the progress of this!!!

We were so busy  Easter weekend that in the history of SOH being in this business we ALMOST ran out of beer - come the Tuesday following the weekend we had only a little bit of 1 beer left - despite ordering over and above what we thought we'd need.... how amazing is that!! Can't begin to tell you how many kilo's of fish we sold and no's of Burgers coming out of the kitchen.

Just before the Easter SOH and I had a visit to one of Rick Steins places - the Cornish Arms in St Merryn - another St Austell pub.  The great man wasn't there (shame!) but his gorgeous Head Chef Luke was (why are so many Chef's small?? - my Chef says they start off tall but the hard work shrinks them!!) and actually he was pretty easy on the eye (!) and a thoroughly likeable young man.  We went with the sole intention of seeing what we could learn and what we could do to ensure that were doing the sorts of food that would enable faster turn around time in the height of summer.  We came away with a few good ideas, but Luke was very complimentary when told about what we are currently doing and actually we also came away thinking likewise!! 

But we are definitely going to be serving more fresh fish from now on and through the summer and I'll keep you posted over the next few weeks about our new summer menus.  The other thing we are definitely going to be doing this year is opening up our upstairs seating area more.  Our summer staff are almost in place and a couple of youngsters to be doing a bit more of the running up and down stairs.

So then, that was Easter. Hopefully business will start to climb up and up towards the summer now and we start to plan properly for the big events this year. I did a Facebook poll about whether we should have TV in the Victoria for the Olympics and Her Majesty's Jubilee - but got a resounding no! So not sure we shall have a TV, but we are planning our own 'inside' street party for the Jubilee.